Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

by Swafford, Jan

  23. In the chorus’s third Kyrie the tenors and altos leap up in the middle of the chord: here and in other moments in the mass, Beethoven uses this novel and remarkable effect of intensifying a single chord from within.

  24. The Kyrie, like the end of the whole mass in the choir, ends with the third of the chord in the soprano. Beethoven thereby avoids the effect of a final perfect authentic cadence, as he did in two of the last three piano sonatas. At the end of the Kyrie the basses trace the last part of the generating motif, falling from B down to F-sharp, then starting at C and tracing a long descent down to low D, with a lovely effect of homecoming after a harmonically searching movement that bypasses the dominant key of A. Still, when the basses reach the low D it is still not a perfect authentic cadence—there is a 4–3 suspension (G–F-sharp) above it.

  25. Fiske, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, 36.

  26. Drabkin, Beethoven, 37.

  27. In the brass writing of most of his orchestral music Beethoven stretched the capacities of French horns and largely wrote bland, ordinary trumpet parts—contributing more rhythm and volume than pitch, and usually conventionally allied with the timpani. Perhaps if he had encountered a trumpet virtuoso on the level of Punto with the horn and Dragonetti with the bass, he would have written more imaginatively for the instrument (as Haydn responded to his encounter with an experimental keyed trumpet by writing perhaps his finest concerto). The Missa solemnis, however, has some of the most elaborate and thrilling trumpet parts Beethoven wrote. The opening brass theme of the Gloria is in hemiola, its two-beat superimposed over the 3/4 creating tremendous energy. At the same time it has a dynamic harmonic and rhythmic shape, starting on the D tonic as an extended upbeat, racing up to the dominant, where the climax of the figure is on the hard d of Deo, which falls a third, from A to F-sharp, as it is inflected when spoken.

  28. Kirkendale, “New Roads,” 668.

  29. The rising scale traversing a fifth that I call the Gloria figure is the leading thematic idea of the Gloria movement, in various guises more and less obvious. For example, the Laudamus te recycles and varies it, the Domine fili unigenite theme is a quiet version of it. While in the Gloria one can find echoes of the generating motif if one wishes, the falling-third motif is everywhere—as it is in the whole mass. Now the falling third begins to be extended into themes built on chains of falling thirds, such as the glorificamus theme, built on the scaffolding of C-sharp–A–C-sharp–A–F-sharp–D (on the downbeats).

  30. The trombones do not appear in the manuscript scores and were added later by Beethoven by way of instructions to his copyists. Nonetheless, they are hardly an afterthought. They are the most elaborate trombone parts Beethoven ever wrote, and in their soli appearances they are indispensable. At other times they are used to double the vocal lines in figures of what must have been, to trombonists of the time, forbiddingly athletic. The same happens in the Ninth Symphony.

  31. If one boils down the theme of the in gloria dei Patris fugue to its framework, mostly on the strong beats, one gets D–G–E–A–F-sharp–B–A–G–F-sharp. So it is built on the generating motif. At the same time, that framework is precisely the theme—transposed—of the finale fugue of the op. 110 Piano Sonata. That thematic connection, I assume, for a change, was unconscious on Beethoven’s part.

  32. Fortunately, since the tempos in the mass are already hard enough to deal with, Beethoven did not add metronome markings.

  33. From m. 86 in the Credo, what I call the “long ascent” is established as a musical and symbolic motif. There are a few answering descents, the main one being the long descent of the solo violin in the Sanctus.

  34. See Kinderman, “Symbol for the Deity.”

  35. Kirkendale, “New Roads,” 677.

  36. Ibid., 676.

  37. Ibid., 679.

  38. Much of the effect of what I call the “wailing” line that accompanies the Crucifixus (from m. 167) comes from the piercing cross-relations of the theme’s C-natural against C-sharp in the basses.

  39. The et resurrexit proclamation is usually described as Mixolydian, but if so that amounts to C Mixolydian for three chords and G Mixolydian by the end—the final G-major chord sounds like an arrival, not a dominant. I’m calling the general effect “modal” mainly because of root-position chords moving by step—an archaic harmonic effect that Beethoven uses often in the mass and in the Seid umschlungen section of the Ninth Symphony finale.

  40. As Kinderman points out (“Symbol for the Deity”), the et vitam venturi fugue theme in itself has seven descending thirds. However, the wind introduction and then the fugal entries are interlocked in a way that sustains a much longer descending chain. From m. 306, the oboe outlines G–E-flat–C–A (leaping up for the last). Then the sopranos enter a third down on F, their theme descending in thirds (some of them inverted to a sixth) down to F. At that point the fugal line always leaps up a sixth, here to D, so the next entry of the fugue theme enters a third down on B-flat and begins its descent of seven thirds. Beethoven would have laid out this pattern first and then composed the music around it—these things don’t happen by accident, in the thickets of writing counterpoint. However, for harmonic reasons the entries on B-flat do not descend in thirds from that note, but from A—from which point the chain of thirds again connects the next two entries. What I am proposing here, with a necessary harmonic adjustment, is a quasi-endless chain of thirds. For Beethoven to use descending thirds as a metaphor for “life ever after” has a clear symbolism: that chain has no innate stopping point, can cycle endlessly as long one wants, in contrast to music built on a tonic–dominant axis. Descending thirds in themselves are also, of course, a primal motif in the mass.

  41. Kinderman, in ibid., makes this connection of the Kant quotation and moments in the mass and the Ninth.

  42. The relation of the Eucharist to salvation in Catholic doctrine is complex and much debated, so of course I don’t propose to present the matter fully.

  43. Kirkendale, in “New Roads” (686–87), writes that the quiet brass chorale that begins the Sanctus recalls the “tower music” tradition in German lands, in which trombones and other brass intoned popular religious songs from town towers, their music sometimes compared to a chorus of angels. He notes that Beethoven wrote three chorale-like equali for trombones at the request of a towermaster in Linz. Here is another example of how the Missa solemnis is intimately involved with tradition while remaining unique.

  44. The autograph calls for the soloists alone to sing the Pleni sunt coeli and Hosanna, but over the years most conductors have used the full choir. I vote for that, for several reasons: the chorus projects the splendor of the music better; soloists can’t balance the orchestral tutti; and the movement needs the contrast of a choral section between two segments for soloists. There is a similar ambiguity about who sings the et incarnatus. I find it deeply moving with the tenors of the choir, unsatisfying with a tenor soloist in his relatively bland low register.

  45. The Pleni and Hosanna fugues, both short and unrelated in theme, tempo, meter, and texture, form one of the most bewildering stretches of the mass. They obliterate every norm of Classical continuity, form, and relationship of material.

  46. Kirkendale, “New Roads,” 687–88. Kirkendale points out that Beethoven would have performed organ improvisations during the Eucharist in the church jobs of his teens. In the score Beethoven has an organ, so he could have used it for the Präludium, but he preferred to create an organlike effect in the orchestra—and the effect is quietly stunning. The scoring and the chromaticism of the Präludium are virtually proto-Wagnerian. Its central section emphasizes the generative motif.

  47. From the beginning of the violin solo, there are sixteen measures of G major in slow tempo without an accidental. The first accidental is a chromatic appoggiatura on D-sharp. Finally there are some modulations, but mostly the music stays close to G major.

  48. Kirkendale, “New Roads,” 689.

  49. The contrast of the
searching, roaming harmonic style of much of the mass and the long dwelling on G major in the “Benedictus” is another example of what I mean about Beethoven’s late style: he became both more complex and more simple.

  50. When Beethoven “explodes” the form with the storm in the Pastoral Symphony and the war music in the Missa solemnis, he violates the form for a reason—for the sake of a dramatic, programmatic, pictorial effect that is, as the term goes, “extramusical.” True, some have made efforts to integrate these moments into a logical, “purely musical” framework, including calling the storm the introduction to the symphony’s finale, or a transition. In the case of the Pastoral these ideas are not entirely irrelevant, but what I am saying is that these theoretical constructs contradict what Beethoven intended, which is that these elements are not to be considered part of the form but rather do violence to it, for extramusical reasons. Again: for a composer of Beethoven’s level, form is another means of expression. As I will show, in the finale of the Ninth he stretches the extramusical dimension still further, in the context not of a familiar formal outline but rather within an episodic, ad hoc form. In other words, in the finale of the Ninth there is no formal norm to break, so the programmatic elements (especially the recalls of earlier movements) take a further step toward what we might call the “purely extramusical.” Perhaps the same could be said of the Agnus Dei in the mass, but that has a simpler and less episodic formal layout than the finale of the Ninth. In the Agnus Dei, in other words, there is a clear-enough form to make breaking it meaningful.

  51. In the choir, from the tempo primo at m. 190 Beethoven strings together fourteen falling thirds by m. 232.

  52. M. Cooper, Beethoven, 272.

  53. I would argue that all the greatest works of religious art are, in the end, universal, because they move us in human terms whether or not we subscribe to their faith. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is the archetypal example. I will speculate that the Missa solemnis is personal because Beethoven, being who he was, could not make it otherwise. Bach, by contrast, seems to me to be more conscious—perhaps with the support of his sect—of making biblical stories and religious doctrine universally human: the St. Matthew Passion is immediately about the death of Christ, but also about the universal experience of death and loss. There is the way that in his sacred music Bach subsumed the emotions of opera, the genre he never got around to writing.

  31. You Millions

  1. Levy, Beethoven, 20.

  2. Cook, Beethoven, 11. One of those sketches is highly reminiscent of the slow movement of the Pathétique.

  3. B. Cooper, Beethoven, 264–65.

  4. Levy, Beethoven, 28.

  5. Cook, Beethoven, 14.

  6. Winter, “Sketches,” 182–84.

  7. Kirby, “Beethoven and the ‘Geselliges Lied,’” 120.

  8. Solomon, “Masonic Thread,” 151.

  9. Donakowski, Muse, 50–51.

  10. Winter, “Sketches,” 183. As Winter notes, those nineteen stages of sketching the Freude theme did not necessarily take much time. Six or eight attempts at a theme can be the work of an hour or less.

  11. Cook, Beethoven, 94. “A Marseillaise for humanity” was the apt phrase of Edgar Quinet in the nineteenth century—though he also spread the erroneous rumor that Schiller’s censored original poem was “An die Freiheit” (To Freedom).

  12. Winter, in “Sketches,” calls the Freude theme a “synthetic folk song” and places it in the tradition of folk roots in Haydn and Mozart. Without entirely disagreeing, I am more inclined to place it in the popularistic tradition of the geselliges Lied, the social song, which may subsume folk music but has its own tradition. Also I think national anthems are a relevant model, and they are not usually folk songs, though they may utilize one. I’ll opine that in comparison to An die Freude, Haydn’s anthem is the better tune, arguably the finest of all national anthems. In comparison, the American Star-Spangled Banner is notoriously awkward to sing, with too wide a range.

  13. There is an often-repeated story that even as Beethoven planned the Freude theme as the focus of the choral Ninth, he also resisted the idea and sketched a purely instrumental finale. That idea is attractive given that, in the end, as the text will address, Beethoven had second thoughts about the finale. But Winter, in “Sketches,” gives a convincing rebuttal to Nottebohm and later writers who thought a sketch marked Finale instrumentale was intended as an alternative for the Ninth finale. (That theme ended up in op. 132.)

  14. One of the most striking things about the Ninth’s beginning is how A sounds like the tonic until, at the end of the first tremolo section, Beethoven adds a D against the A and E, anticipating the D-minor arpeggio and undermining the A in a quite disorienting way.

  15. After the return of the tremolo idea on D–A in the beginning, there is no real cadence to D minor until the D pedal of m. 328, and that is a weak cadence. The first strong cadence after the opening is to B-flat at the closing section of the exposition. There is no true perfect authentic cadence to D until the return of the closing section just before the coda.

  16. After the moment of lyrical warmth in B-flat, there is an echoing phrase in a sudden magical turn to B major a couple of pages later.

  17. Solomon, in Beethoven, writes about the dissolution of the heroic style, after which “[t]he task he would set himself in his late music would be the portrayal of heroism without heroics, without heroes” (295). I don’t, however, find much implied “portrayal of heroism” in the late music. The centrality of brotherhood in the Ninth and the spirituality of much of the late music are not concerned with heroic ideals at all.

  18. Note that Wagner, for whom the Ninth was an obsession and in many ways a starting point, in the Ring cycle depicts the failure of the masculine principle of power and heroism, embodied in the heroic fool Siegfried, and the triumph of the feminine principle of compassion, embodied in Brünnhilde. In that, then, he also echoes the Ninth. The beginning of the Ring, that enormous, slow-unfolding E-flat-major chord that evokes the Rhine, is one of many descendants of the Ninth’s opening, others to be found in Bruckner and Mahler.

  19. Tovey never more clearly revealed his willful hostility to fundamental thematic relationships than when he wrote of the B-flat interlude in the first movement of the Ninth that its resemblance to the Freude theme is “superficial and entirely accidental.”

  20. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 430–31.

  21. The scherzo of the Ninth is one of Beethoven’s excursions in unusual timpani tunings, another striking example being the tritone tuning at the beginning of the dungeon scene in Fidelio.

  22. A long-standing and unresolved question over the fourth horn solo in the movement debates whether Beethoven had an early valved horn available, or whether he wanted a great many stopped notes—the solos are possible to play on an open horn, but barely.

  23. Solomon has called the Ninth “an extended metaphor of a quest for Elysium.” What defines that search is the way the Freude theme is foreshadowed from the beginning. That is the kind of foreshadowing Beethoven usually did, but this time it involves a text in the finale and thus more tangible images, all the prefiguring at the service of shaping an absolutely end-directed symphony.

  24. Cook, Beethoven, 101.

  25. Levy, Beethoven, 20. It was to his Illuminatus friend Körner that Schiller wrote about “An die Freude” in 1800: “It still remains a bad poem and represents a stage of my development that I have since left behind in order to produce something respectable.” All the same, because everybody already knew it, Schiller published it in his collected poems, but deleted some of its more extravagant prerevolutionary sentiments, among them “beggars become brothers of princes.”

  26. Solomon, “Beethoven, Freemasonry,” 113.

  27. Lockwood, Beethoven: Music, 422.

  28. Friedrich Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, quoted in Solomon, Beethoven Essays, 11.

  29. My score of the finale has the tempo of the opening as dotted half =
90, which is a long-standing engraver’s mistake. Beethoven’s actual intended tempo was dotted half = 66, which is awkward but at least performable for the opening fanfare. But that tempo is unworkably fast for the bass recitatives, which Beethoven insisted he wanted done in strict time. In strict time, a pulse of 66 for the bar would turn the recitatives into waltzes. At the same time, 66 for the fanfare buzzes past the opening harmony so fast as to negate its impact—even more so when it comes back later as a crunch of all the notes in the scale. In contrast, Beethoven’s tempo of quarter = 88 is entirely reasonable for the first movement (one often hears faster performances), likewise 116 for the second movement (again, modern performances are sometimes faster). Metronome 60 and 63 for the third movement are reasonable, but many take it slower and I prefer it that way—Beethoven’s metronome mark seems to me to damage the sense of reverie and timelessness in the slow movement. For a survey of problems in these and other metronome indications in the symphonies, see C. Brown, “Historical Performance.”

  30. None of the earlier movements recalled in the opening section of the finale are quoted literally: the first adds C-sharp to the first movement’s A–E tremolo; rather than a false tonic, the harmony now sounds vaguely like the dominant seventh of D, which it actually is. The bit of the second movement is in A minor, not D minor; the beginning of the third movement is properly in B-flat, but in winds rather than strings. All those changes help integrate the snippets into the tonal and timbral spectrum of the D-major finale, with its stretch of B-flat and its frequent emphasis on the wind band (all but one of the recollections are mainly in winds).